It appears, then, that some men utilize the labour of others; but if they will only continue to do this for a long time, and on a still larger scale, then this incorrect distribution of wealth, that is, utilizing of other men's labour, will vanish.
Men are standing by an ever-increasing spring of water, and are busy turning it aside from thirsty men, and then they assert that it is they who produce this water, and that soon there will be so much of it that everybody will have enough and to spare. And this water, which has been running unceasingly, and nourishing all mankind, is not only not the result of the activity of those who, standing at its source, turn it aside, but it runs and spreads itself in spite of the endeavours to stop it from doing so.
There has always existed a true church,—in other words, men united by the highest truth accessible to them at a certain epoch,—but it has never been that church which gave herself out for such; and there have always been real art and science, but they were not those which call themselves now by these names.
Men who consider themselves to be the representatives of art and science in a given period of time, always imagine that they have been doing, are doing, and the important fact is that they are on the point of making wonderful things, and that beyond them there has never been any art or science. Thus it seemed to the sophists, to the scholiasts, alchemists, cabalists, Talmudists, and to our own scientific science and to our artistic art.
CHAPTER XXXVI
“But science! art! You repudiate science, art; that is, you repudiate that by which mankind live.”
I am always hearing this: people choose this way to put aside my arguments altogether without analyzing them. “He repudiates science and art; he wishes to turn men back again to the savage state; why, then, should we listen to him, or argue with him?”
But this is unjust. Not only do I not repudiate science—human reasonable activity—and art,—the expression of this reasonable activity,—but it is actually in the name of this reasonable activity and its expression that I speak what I do, in order that mankind may avoid the savage state towards which they are rapidly moving, owing to the false teaching of our time.
Science and art are as necessary to men as food, drink, and clothes,—even still more necessary than these; but they become such, not because we decide that what we call science and art are necessary, but because they are truly necessary to men. Now, if I should prepare hay for the bodily food of men, my idea that hay is food would not make it to be so. I cannot say, Why do you not eat hay when it is your necessary food? Food is, indeed, necessary, but perhaps what I offer is not food at all.
This very thing has happened with our science and art. And to us it seems that when we add to a Greek word the termination logy, and call this science, it will be science indeed; and if we call an indecency, like the painting of naked women, by the Greek word “choreography,” and term it art, it will be art indeed.